It is the way of sporting obsessives to entertain vivid fantasises about the
games that beguile us.

Even as a portly schlump who needs oxygen on the three-minute walk to the newsagent, mine still range from beating Rafael Nadal in the French Open final to snatching Marvin Hagler’s middleweight title by way of a contentious split decision. And I am anything but alone.

For a feature long ago, a bunch of well-known people were selected at random from the contacts book and asked if they had any such fantasy. Without exception, they did. The Labour MP, and later sports minister, Kate Hoey rose toweringly at the far post to nod an injury-time FA Cup final winner for Arsenal, while the Methodist lay preacher Lord Soper, 87 then, rolled in a 15-footer to win the Ryder Cup.

Yet although nobody mentioned this one, I can’t be alone in daydreaming occasionally about being a referee. Wouldn’t it be fun to be plucked from the north London derby crowd, with all the officials felled by salmonella, and send off three of Ms Hoey’s beloved Gunners, during the warm-up, for wearing gloves?

In America, if without the same partisanship, the fantasy recently became a reality. A “lock out” of professional American football referees, sidelined during a dispute with the NFL about pay and pensions, necessitated the use of replacements with experience limited to low level college games “and in minor professional organisations including a women-only league”, as one report revealed, “whose players compete wearing lingerie”.

Earlier this week, in the midst of a lively presidential campaign, the lead story on a major political website, the Huffington Post, concerned this lurch into amateur hour (or amateur six hours with all the timeouts). Claiming to grasp the fine detail would be a fantasy too far.

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So suffice it to state that, after a Hail Mary pass in the last seconds of their game with Green Bay Packers, the substitute ref awarded the Seattle Seahawks a match-winning touch-down he should have disallowed on two fantastically obvious grounds. And that after languidly reviewing the incident on tape.

So unanimous was the response that, for the first and doubtless last time this autumn, President Barack Obama agreed with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, a congressman from Green Bay’s home state of Wisconsin.

But then from the arugula-chomping elitists of New England to the Confederate Flag-waving rednecks of the deep south, the whole country was so united in outrage that the NFL hurriedly cut the deal that prompted the Hufington Post to lead on Thursday with the joyous headline: “The Pros Are Back”.

All of which brings us to this thesis. If something similar afflicted English football, and amateurs were pressed into service, it would not take a sceptical public long to appreciate how excellent referees have become.

We whine about them incessantly, but the improvement has been astonishing since the days when our leading ref was Clive Thomas. He was the genius who ended a 1978 World Cup match while the ball was airborne from the corner he gave Brazil, but before Zico headed it home for what briefly seemed the winner against Sweden.

Admittedly, a rival for Most Egregious World Cup Decision Ever came more recently from another British ref, when in 2006 Graham Poll sent off Croatia’s Josip Simunic only after showing him a third yellow card, for no apparent reason, and only then after blowing for full-time.

Yet we cannot all be Carol Vorderman, and given several minutes to review the matter on videotape, even Poll might have corrected himself.

Despite the 792 camera angles and the unceasing analysis lavished on their every decision by pundits, it is exceedingly rare these days for a referee, despite seeing the incident only once, to make a howler like the one in the NFL.

There are no Clive Thomases any more, and very few David Ellerays, and while one naturally misses the hilarity their incompetence inspired, by and large this is a good thing.

If the Premier League refs had the gumption to strike, and leave their work to amateurs and fantasists for a single Saturday, the NFL experiment suggests they would be thrilled by the unwonted respect that greeted them on their return.